As for the “new” Captain Marvel, there’s this. Great thing about the new costume is that the character still comes completely through, maybe even more so. Just hope they find an appropriate use for the old one. It’s a gorgeous design.

So the phone battery starts dying Sunday morning. Only holds charge for five hours or so.

First place I go to can’t quite do anything on the spot, so go to Grand Central Terminal Apple Store Genius Bar.

First, battery is in fact (understandably) dying. Replaced on the spot.

Also recommends restoring of OS. Wipes the phone.

Go home, restore.

But this is where it gets really cool: After OS is reinstalled, restores phone from last automatic wireless back up to Apple server. This is done every day or so when the phone is connected to a charger and is on wifi.

Then again, this is a company that has abused a monopoly bought by corrupting politicians since the first day of business. A company free to abuse customers because our options are limited.

Today’s fun fact: Customer service doesn’t know that there’s an outage (what we had this morning) until and unless they get a number of complaints from a localized area. In other words, customer service doesn’t and can’t know the status of the system.

So I end up having to drive for a replacement modem because CS couldn’t tell me my modem wasn’t a problem. A tech making a house call later in the day told me that I had been blessed with this morning was the worst one used in the system. He replaced it with what he said was the best.

As if it matters.

The store told me I could register the new modem by phone call to CS. CS said I actually couldn’t do it till service was restored. Which was still hours away.

At least my last payment to Cablevision was my last.

I ordered FIOS.

I am optimistic and hopeful, but only guardedly so.

On the other hand, I’ll be saving so much that Verizon will have to be much worse than Cablevision is to make it a bad decision. And since Cablevision is the worst there is….

As I said, guardedly hopeful.

But happy to be rid of Cablevision. (The TV and phone providers far less so but the former got just too greedy….)

So I was wrong. I thought as the hardships trickled up from the poor into the middle class, so would the will to address them. I figured that if altruism weren’t enough, self-interest would spark a spirit of shared sacrifice motivating Americans to focus their government’s power to fill gaps in the private economy. Instead, the only people who gained from the trickle-up theory were the recipients of government bailouts at the very top of the financial hierarchy, which housed those who got us into the mess in the first place. — David K. Shipler

Doomed. For real. An inexcuseable, shameful failure of thge Whores who Rule Us.

See what a superior job in the economy Republican leadership performs.

I wonder what Eisenhower would make of today’s US, with a military grown from 3.5 million people to 5 million. The western nations face less of a threat to their integrity and security than ever in history, yet their defence industries cry for ever more money and ever more things to do. The cold war strategist, George Kennan, wrote prophetically: “Were the Soviet Union to sink tomorrow under the waters of the ocean, the American military-industrial complex would have to remain, substantially unchanged, until some other adversary could be invented.” — Simon Jenkins/The Guardian (the best paper you don’t reader and a sterling example of a still-great newspaper — over Keller’s and Pinch’s minds, of course).

Doomed:

The result – that one theory has been proved wrong, another proved right, yet the world continues to believe in Theory #1 – is frustrating. It’s also tragic, because that intellectual obstinacy is contributing to the “new normal” of permanently high unemployment. — Krugman.

It seems the Gang of 500 has decided that it’s ok to notice that people are unemployed again, although since the solutions from politicians seem to be “cut taxes and spending” and “cut spending but not quite as much” we’re probably not going to get any kind of real discussion of what might actually help those weird foreign creatures known as the unemployed. — Atrios

Doomed! Contra Atrios, the Republicans would be happy fiscally if they just destroy Social Security and Medicare and cut the wealthy’s taxes. All they care about is getting money away from government and into the hands of the speculators (not investors, because the Republicans’ policies hurt investors and small businesses).